New analysis of the White House’s annual pay report revealed the executive mansion has a gender pay gap of 20%, despite past remarks from President Biden, who vowed to work on the issue and has repeatedly demanded equal pay for women.
Despite Biden’s own calls for other employers to address discrepancies in pay among genders, the annual pay report submitted to Congress disclosed the names, positions and varying salaries of the more than 440 White House staff members.
The median salary for men on Biden’s staff is $105,000, while women who work for the president earn significantly less at a median salary of $84,000, according to an examination of the report. Biden himself is paid $400,000 a year.
The analysis – first reported by the Wall Street Journal – was conducted by Mark Perry, an American Enterprise Institute scholar.
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The analysis from Perry, who has evaluated White House salaries from multiple presidencies, found that women working for Biden earn 80 cents for every dollar that’s being paid to men who work for the president.
The White House’s current gender pay gap, according to the Journal’s analysis, is likely caused by a “composition effect.” The newspaper noted that there are more women working in the White House than there are men – 269 to 179 – and highlighted the fact that there are more women in lower-paid roles.
Though women working in the White House are earning less than men overall, some women, including White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and eight others, are listed with salaries of $180,000.
A Journal editorial also pointed out that the gender pay gap figure stemming from the White House had slightly surpassed the national average for the workforce in 2022, which was indicated by the White House’s own analysis.
In an estimate from the White House Council of Economic Advisers, it was revealed that among full-time workers, women earned only 83 cents for every dollar earned by men.
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“If Mr. Biden pays only 80 cents on the dollar, does that mean his White House is three percentage points more structurally sexist than the labor market writ large,” the Journal editorial board wrote.
Despite the discrepancy in pay among women and men who work for Biden, the president has continuously criticized the so-called pay gap in the U.S. economy.
During a March event at the White House to mark “national equal pay day,” Biden said he was “working to change” pay disparities between men and women.
“I call upon all Americans to recognize the full value of women’s skills and their significant contributions to the labor force, acknowledge the injustice of wage inequality and join efforts to achieve equal pay,” the president said at the time.
Biden, who reportedly had a decades-long history of paying female staffers less than their male counterparts while in the Senate, was also ridiculed earlier this year after he shared a photo to X, then known as Twitter, of a handwritten letter from a little girl named “Charlotte” calling on him to close the gender pay gap.
“Charlotte, I couldn’t agree more,” Biden wrote at the time. “Women lose thousands of dollars each year, and hundreds of thousands over a lifetime, because of gender and racial wage gaps. I’m committed to building an economy where my daughters have the same rights and opportunities as my sons.”
According to 2019 analysis by the Washington Free Beacon of spending reports disclosed in the biannual report of the secretary of the Senate, women working for Biden were paid less than their male counterparts during the entirety of Biden’s time in the Senate from January 1973 to January 2009.
During former President Donald Trump’s White House tenure in 2017, Perry found a gender pay gap of 37%. He also found in 2016 that the pay gap under former President Barack Obama stood at 11%.
